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Energy Storage Technology

Vecco Group: $25m for Australia’s first vanadium battery plant.

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Queensland-based Vecco Group will spend up to $25 million building Australia’s first vanadium battery plant in Brisbane.

Vecco Group and Australia’s first vanadium battery plant

According to InQueensland, Vecco Group have come to an agreement with China’s Shanghai Electric – one of the largest electrical equipment manufacturing companies in China – for an initial purchase of vanadium electrolytes (Confused about flow batteries? Click here to learn how a Vanadium Redox Battery works)

Thomas Northcott, Managing Director of Vecco Group said, “this is a significant step forward for Vecco in securing an integrated supply chain from our Debella Vanadium + HPA Project through to battery production.”

“We are excited to be capturing the first mover advantage in Australia and south east Asia for what is a rapidly growing market for large scale renewable energy storage.” Northcott continued in a press release from Vecco Group.

“Demand is currently strong and there is significant future demand supplying large long duration vanadium batteries to support green hydrogen projects around Australia.”

Vecco is also carrying out a pre-IPO to raise $5 million and is aiming at a full IPO next year.

As we continue with advancements in solar battery technology, it’s fantastic to see alternative options to lithium-ion – the flow batteries such as Redflow are awfully heavy but they have a great use case if the technology can continue improving at this rate. With that said, vanadium batteries have been proposed as early as the 1930’s and have been in production since the 1980’s, so they probably have some ground to make up.

Vecco Group Flow Battery example by Colintheone – https://avs.scitation.org/doi/10.1116/1.4983210, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=59002803

The vanadium industry

The vanadium industry has progressed significantly in 2021 with multiple announcements, including one from from mining billionaire Robert Friedland’s company VRB Energy. VRB announced a 500MWh vanadium flow battery in March. Gigafactory in China and Sir Mick Davis, the ex-CEO of Xstrata are also invested in Kazakhstan based vanadium company Ferro-Alloy Resources.

Vanadium flow batteries last for 25 years, suffer no capacity degradation and a low environmental footprint, as the electrolyte is almost 100% recyclable.

Other companies working in the space include UniEnergy Technologies, StorEn Technologies, and Ashlawn Energy in the United States; Renewable Energy Dynamics Technology and VoltStorage in Europe; Prudent Energy in China;Australian Vanadium in Australia.

 

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sonnen in South Australia – HQ, manufacturing plant.

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sonnen in South Australia – the German battery manufacturing giant (which is also the world’s largest home storage energy company) have announced that they’re going to move their Australian headquarters from Sydney to Adelaide. The announcement was made last week during a huge week for renewables in SA – with the upcoming election both major parties have promised $100m in solar loans for South Australian residents.  

sonnen in South Australia

Along with the administrative tasks (i.e. the ‘headquarters’) of sonnen’s Australian operations, they’ll also be setting up a full energy storage manufacturing facility in the state.

Chris Parratt, the Australian boss of sonnen’s Australasian business, said the company will have a solar battery manufacturing facility ‘up and running’ in Adelaide within six to nine months.  According to the Australian Financial Review, Parratt says the facility will be able to produce 10,000 systems a year, including sonnen’s flagship sonnenBatterie line. He noted that they are looking at four separate locations in Adelaide, including the former Holden car manufacturing site and the former Mitsubishi car-making factory in Tonsley Park precinct. 

sonnen in South Australia
sonnen in South Australia – sonnenBatterie eco 8.2 (source: sonnen.com.au)

Parratt noted that sonnen have set up a similar facility in Atlanta in the United States of America in a fast timeline last year telling a press conference (along with South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill) that they’re confident in scope management:

“We believe in about six to nine months we’ll be producing our first energy storage system,” he said. 

sonnen already have 30,000 household batteries installed in Germany, making them the world’s largest home storage energy company. 

It looks like this will go ahead regardless of whether Weatherill’s incumbent party or the South Australian Liberal leader Steven Marshall wrests control of the state – the latter is against renewable energy targets but has also committed to a $100m means-tested subsidy for up to 40,000 households to get interest free solar loans. 

Weatherill was quick to extol the employment ramifications of the move, having been told he was “doubling down to chase his losses” by federal energy minister Josh Frydenberg last week with regards to raising the RET from 50% to 75%:

“We saw yesterday I was accused of being a problem gambler. Well today, South Australia has hit the jobs jackpot,” Mr Weatherill said, referring to Sonnen’s plans, which will create 130 new immediate jobs, rising to 190 by the end of the year, and then another 300 jobs for trades people to install the batteries.

It’s shaping up to be a very interesting election in South Australia. Who are you voting for, and why? Let us know in the comments. 

 
 

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Volkswagen Electric Car / Battery – $84b Investment

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Volkswagen electric car news – they have announced an $84b investment to create a range of electric vehicles – with plans to have electric versions of all 300 models by 2030. Of this $84b, $50b will be invested in battery production to support these vehicles – not directly linked to solar energy but definitely something that will have myriad benefits for the energy storage industry as a whole. 

The Volkswagen Electric Car / Battery Investment

Volkswagen Electric Car Golf 2017
Volkswagen Electric Car – 2017 e-Golf (source: Volkswagen.com)

Earlier this year VW announced that they were investing $10b in EVs but appear to have changed their strategy considerably over the past 6 months – planning to overtake Tesla and become the biggest electric vehicle company in the world. They’ll make EVs for Volkswagen as well as their other brands such as Audi and Porsche. 

Volkswagen CEO Matthias Mueller said  “A company like Volkswagen must lead, not follow” – and that “…this is not some vague declaration of intent. It is a strong self-commitment which, from today, becomes the yardstick by which we measure our performance.”

With the 2017 Volkswagen e-Golf’s range called ‘sub-par’ by some reviewers, (the 35.8kWh lithium-ion battery pack is up 50% on its predecessor, but it’s still heavy and can only reach 125 miles) it’s imperative that VW work on their battery technology if they’re to be a real contender in the EV space. According to Auto News new EVs will arrive in 2020 with 300 miles of range for a price similar to the Golf. 

Solar Power charging Electric Vehicles

With the Tesla Powerwall 2, the Tesla Solar Roof and the Tesla EVs looking to integrate more tightly over the coming 12 months, there are a couple of questions with regards to renewable energy and EVs. Firstly, will we see an influx of electric cars with solar panels? Secondly – how tightly will rooftop PV solar and EV recharging integrate over the coming years? 

To answer the first question, it’s definitely something being worked on – last month Audi announced they’re partnering with a Chinese solar panel manufacturer to add a solar roof on Audi’s electric cars. In fact, this dates as far back as the Mazda 929 in 1991 – the technology just hasn’t been good enough. Solar panel tech has been advancing rapidly over the past few years and we expect to see more solar panels on cars over the coming years – they’re cheaper, more flexible, and able to absorb much more energy than previous panels.

Secondly, that’s definitely something people are also trying to solve – energy storage technology plays a massive part in this as the ideal charging times (i.e. when people aren’t at home and therefore not using electricity) aren’t usually times when the car is in its garage! So using smart technology like the Redback Smart Hybrid System and teaching it about electricity usage patterns and joining that up with other information such as weather forecasts will play a key part in marrying solar power and electric vehicles. One thing’s for sure – this technology is going to move a lot faster over the next few years and it won’t be long before EVs are the norm. 

 

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NorthVolt shape up as Tesla competitor

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A Swedish company called NorthVolt AB are hoping to halve the cost of energy storage by building a 4 billion euro lithium-ion battery factory to rival Tesla‘s ‘gigafactory’. The Stockholm-based company is the brainchild of founder Peter Mikael Carlsson, Tesla’s former head of sourcing and supply chains.

The NorthVolt Vision

NorthVolt Peter Mikael Carlsson
The NorthVolt Team (source: northvolt.com)

According to Bloomberg, NorthVolt are hoping to raise 1 billion euros by 2018 so they’re able to commence construction on a factory in Q3, and start production in 2020. Carlsson says NorthVolt are going to announce a shortlist of possible manufacturing sites (all based in Sweden) in a month or two. They’ve already raised 5 million kronor (~675,000 euros) from for their foray into energy storage technology.

“Europe will be a very important market for energy storage,” Carlsson told Bloomberg in a phone interview, adding: “…there is a huge need for back-up power. There is also a sizable auto industry that has made big promises to go electric.” “Coming out of this partnership round and going into a larger financing round next, we see that it will look favourable to the financial market that we have a number of customers that have already shown commitment by investing in us.”

So we can see that NorthVolt have a huge vision and Carlsson certainly has the pedigree to be able to pull it off –

Inverse report that the completed Northvolt factory will produce 32 gigawatt-hours of storage per annum – in comparison to Tesla’s Gigafactory, slated to produce 35 gigawatt-hours. Elon Musk, the Tesla CEO, has been quoted as saying 35 gigawatt-hours is enough to power 1% of the entire world’s energy supply onto renewable – so it’d be amazing to have two of them up and running within the next few years. How long until the entire world is running on 100% renewable energy? Maybe not in any too-near timeframe but it isn’t that far off, either.

We’ve linked a video below which introduces Northvolt and how they plan to commence ‘Enabling the Future of Energy’ – it’s just a short primer but well worth a watch if you’re interested (and if you’ve made it to the end of this article hopefully you will be!). We look forward to reporting more about NorthVolt vs. Tesla in the future. Keeping in mind it’s not exactly a competition and we hope they both succeed.

 

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